Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”
Who needs expensive frontier models to find software vulns? Cisco has just released two open-weight models that specialize in finding known bugs in existing codebases. The models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, are part of Cisco’s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face - but only to vetted users. “We’re making sure we’re gating that and appropriately granting access,” DJ Sampath, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform, told The Register. The company is working with academic and nonprofit organizations, as well as smaller and public organizations’ security teams, to ensure they have access to the vulnerability-hunting models. Plus, because both are small models designed to run locally, “you also need the keys to the source code” to scan for and find vulnerabilities, Sampath said. “This means an attacker is going to be able to exploit an endpoint or a service that you have.” It also means that proprietary code never leaves the organization’s machines, compared to cloud-based LLMs that send code to the AI providers’ external servers for processing and analysis. This enables security analysis in environments with strict privacy or compliance requirements, according to the networking and security giant. And yes, it's named after the massive red super-giant star. “It's almost 1,000 times bigger than the sun, even though the sun dominates the sky, and that is the analogy that we're using here for vulnerability detection and localization,” Cisco VP and chief AI scientist Amin Karbasi told The Register. “The impact of vulnerabilities in your codebase is huge, but it might be only a single file or a few lines of code in a million lines of code.” A future, 3-billion-parameter model in the Antares family won’t be released to the public, Karbasi added. “We are completely gating the 3B model to make sure that we responsibly release it to communities that need it,” he said. Small yet mighty Cisco claims that its models perform as well as or better than dozens of larger models in its new benchmark test that measures how efficiently AI models identify security flaws in codebases. Antares-1B outperforms Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and is comparable to Z.ai's GLM-5.2, we’re told, while the yet-to-be-released Antares-3B does a better job at finding vulnerabilities than GLM-5.2 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Plus, we’re told that the small models scan code much faster and at a fraction of the cost of larger, token-gobbling AI systems. “If you look at the performance, in terms of the time it takes to finish 500 repositories, Antares finishes the entire cohort of repositories in 15 minutes, whereas frontier models take five hours,” Karbasi said, adding that this translates to significantly less cost. “It takes like less than $1 whereas frontier models are above $100 into $150 of cost,” he added. The difference, Karbasi explained, is that Cisco took a “fundamentally different approach” to building Antares. “These models have been trained in a very different way,” he said. “Antares is inherently not a chatbot. It is an investigator. It is a search engine. It has to find a very specific thing that might be a needle in a haystack, and it goes and finds that.” This required training the model on several different ways to search for vulnerabilities “because one way of search may not actually be fruitful, then it has to change its strategy, do it another way, and then do it another way,” Karbasi said. “Because it is very nimble and it’s very small, it can actually do a lot of search at the same time, which is very different from bigger models.” Karbasi likened it to a bicycle on a busy London street: “You can go much faster than the biggest truck.” Or, to use Sampath’s favorite analogy for the benefits of using a small, security-focused model to find bugs in code: “Sometimes you don't need a private jet to go to a corner store, right?”®
England international signs seven-year contract
Xabi Alonso was key factor in Chelsea’s record signing
Morgan Rogers has joined Chelsea from Aston Villa for a fee of £117m, signing a seven-year deal to become the Blues’ record signing.
A deal was agreed on Saturday for the 23-year-old to move to Stamford Bridge as the club stole in ahead of Arsenal, who had been in talks to sign the England international and had appeared to be favourites to secure his signature.
Continue reading...The rebooted GCHQ digital warfare series has more zip than its predecessor – but people bashing away on computers in a bunker near Cheltenham is inherently unsexy
If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.
In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.
Continue reading...Staff ‘raised on multiple occasions’ risks of tech mogul’s philanthropic body associating with disgraced financier
A new external review commissioned by the Gates Foundation has found that there were “roughly 30 meetings” between Jeffrey Epstein and foundation leaders and staff – including Bill Gates – between 2011 and 2014, even as foundation staff “raised on multiple occasions the risks of associating with Epstein because of his prior conviction”.
The Gates foundation commissioned the review in March, following the justice department’s release earlier this year of millions of documents related to Epstein. The files included numerous references to Gates, several photographs of him, and records showing that he met with Epstein on multiple occasions, which prompted renewed scrutiny of Gates’s past ties to the disgraced financier.
Continue reading...I came across this fun little comic titled We Didn’t Lose the Plot. It has a straightforward conclusion: more things should come to an end. The “things” referred to here is media like books and movies and television but I’d extend it to many other things as well.
Like web projects.
So often, things are built in the attempt to have infinite growth. And like cancer, they seemingly grow to the point where the entire thing eventually dies or becomes useless at the problem it originally set out to solve.
I like projects that have a definitive end. One of the things I liked about doing the Fifty project was that it had to finish. I don’t need to do a Fifty: The Refiftying, or Fifty 2: Fifty Boogaloo, or 2 Fifty 2 Furious. The project is done.
It’s likely why I enjoy building concepts or mini-apps. They’re quick and solve a specific problem or answer a particular question without needing to be grown, sold, serviced, or maintained.
I’ve been considering potential projects that would have a specific end in mind with which I could build a mini-site around. I don’t have anything planned yet but I’m looking forward to the possibilities.
Have something to say? Tell me about it.
FIFA World Cup 2026? The FIFA World Cup? is football's most prestigious international tournament, bringing together the world's leading national teams in a global celebration of sport, culture and identity. First held in 1930, the competition takes place every four years and has produced some of the most memorable moments and influential figures in sporting history. The FIFA World Cup 2026? marks a new chapter for the tournament. Hosted across Canada, Mexico and the United States, it is the first edition to be staged across three nations. Featuring a record 48 teams, 104 matches and 16 host cities, the tournament represents the largest and most inclusive FIFA World Cup? ever held. Defined by passion, national pride and unpredictable drama, the World Cup extends far beyond the pitch. Football intersects with fashion, art, music and popular culture, while each nation expresses its own visual identity through uniforms, symbols and supporter traditions. Players such as Pelé, Diego Marado
A federal judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement over pirated books used to train its Claude chatbot, with authors and publishers set to receive about $3,000 per book. The case produced a mixed ruling for the AI industry: training on copyrighted books was found not to be illegal, but Anthropic's use of pirated copies from shadow libraries was. The Associated Press reports: District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides "meaningful relief" to affected authors and publishers. About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was "the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - De reisadviezen voor verschillende landen in het Midden-Oosten zijn aangescherpt. Dat komt omdat de veiligheidssituatie daar is verslechterd, aldus het Nederlandse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken. "De situatie in het Midden-Oosten blijft onvoorspelbaar."
De reisadviezen voor Qatar, Jordanië, Saudi-Arabië, Koeweit en de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten zijn inmiddels oranje. Dat betekent dat het ministerie adviseert om er alleen heen te reizen als dat noodzakelijk is en er niet op vakantie te gaan. Bij problemen kunnen Nederlandse ambassades in de landen minder goed helpen. De oranje kleurcode geldt ook voor delen van Oman.
Het reisadvies voor Bahrein is rood. "Wat uw situatie ook is: reis er niet heen. Het is er te gevaarlijk", meldt het ministerie. Nederlanders die in Bahrein zijn, worden opgeroepen om het land te verlaten, mits dat op een veilige manier kan.
KYIV (ANP) - De gewezen Oekraïense minister van Defensie Mychajlo Fedorov is blij dat president Volodymyr Zelensky een nieuwe commandant der strijdkrachten heeft aangewezen. Op sociale media spreekt Fedorov van "een frisse wind en een bron van nieuwe hoop in de strijd van het vrije volk voor vrijheid en gerechtigheid".
Fedorov werd afgelopen week tot veler verbazing door Zelensky ontheven uit zijn ambt, ondanks zijn populariteit en succes als minister van Defensie. Dat zou naar verluidt verband houden met zijn banden met commandant der strijdkrachten Oleksandr Syrsky, met wie Fedorov slecht overweg kon. Zo zou Fedorov er bij Zelensky op hebben aangedrongen om Syrsky te ontslaan. Het ontslag van Fedorov leidde op meerdere plekken in Oekraïne tot demonstraties en de roep om hem weer defensieminister te maken.
Zelensky kondigde na beraad met Syrsky dinsdag aan hem te vervangen door Mychajlo Drapaty, een andere hooggeplaatste militair.
WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR/AFP) - De Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Pete Hegseth schat dat de Iranoorlog de VS tot dusver zo'n 37,5 miljard dollar (circa 32,5 miljard euro) heeft gekost. Halverwege mei werd nog gesproken over een bedrag van bijna 29 miljard dollar.
Hegseth zei tegenover een senaatscommissie dat de 37,5 miljard dollar inclusief de verwachte kosten tot en met september is. Het is de eerste keer dat Hegseth zich in het openbaar tegenover parlementariërs moet verantwoorden sinds de Verenigde Staten eerder deze maand de militaire operaties tegen Iran hervatten. De minister verdedigde in Washington ook een verzoek voor zo'n 67 miljard dollar aan extra financiering.
De oorlog begon eind februari met Amerikaans-Israëlische aanvallen op Iran. De VS en Iran sloten vorige maand een tijdelijke deal over onder meer een staakt-het-vuren en de hervatting van het scheepvaartverkeer in de Straat van Hormuz. De overeenkomst kwam te vervallen na nieuwe aanvallen over en weer.
NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn dinsdag hoger de handelsdag uitgegaan, geholpen door winsten bij de chipbedrijven. Die toonden herstel na scherpe verliezen in de sector de afgelopen tijd, maar beleggers lijken de zorgen over de hoge investeringen in kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) even naast zich neer te leggen.
De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,7 procent hoger op 52.224,64 punten. De brede S&P 500-index sloot 0,9 procent hoger op 7509,20 punten en techbeurs Nasdaq won 1,3 procent tot 25.837,21 punten.
Chipbedrijven als Marvell Technology, Micron en Intel stegen tot 12,2 procent. Aandelen van Intel waren ook in trek nadat het bedrijf bekendmaakte dat het banen gaat schrappen binnen zijn datacenterdivisie om de kosten te verlagen.
Ontwikkelingen Midden-Oosten
Vorige week leden chipbedrijven op Wall Street nog aanzienlijke koersverliezen, door de zorgen over de hoge investeringen van techbedrijven in AI. Daarvoor zijn veel datacenters en chips nodig, maar beleggers vragen zich af of bedrijven die hoge investeringen wel kunnen terugverdienen en of de aandelenkoersen van chip- en techbedrijven niet te hard zijn opgelopen.
De ogen waren ook gericht op ontwikkelingen in het Midden-Oosten. De Verenigde Staten en Iran voerden afgelopen nacht over en weer nieuwe aanvallen uit, maar er zijn ook berichten dat bemiddelaars proberen een nieuw staakt-het-vuren te bewerkstelligen. Beleggers kijken daarnaast uit naar de kwartaalcijfers van grote bedrijven deze week. Onder meer Google-moederbedrijf Alphabet, elektrische autofabrikant Tesla en techbedrijf IBM openen de boeken.
Hasbro
3M hoorde ook bij de winnaars en werd 7,3 procent hoger gezet. Het industrieconcern werd positiever over de winst dit jaar, na een sterk tweede kwartaal.
SpaceX won 3,1 procent, na een aantal verliesbeurten op rij van het raket- en AI-bedrijf van Elon Musk. Dinsdag profiteerde SpaceX echter van de herhaling van een koopadvies door investeringsbank Macquarie.
Hasbro steeg 8,8 procent. De speelgoedfabrikant overtrof de verwachtingen van analisten en verhoogde zijn prognose voor het hele jaar. Vooral de verkopen van het populaire kaartspel Magic: The Gathering droegen bij aan de sterke prestaties.
It will take about 46 minutes of your life, but watching Revolug speedrun the Kaizo Mario Mod Super Dram World 3 at Summer Games Done Quick 2026 (as creator Panga commentates and spikevegeta react to seeing it for the first time) will make you gasp in awe if you've ever missed a jump in a platformer.
